


Out Among the Missing

by AlwaysLera



Category: Orphan Black (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Natasha Romanov, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Headcanon, I Don't Even Know, Natasha-centric, Orphan Black - Freeform, Orphan Blackhawk, Team Feels, logical crossover is logical, now this is headcanon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-10 16:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2032251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out of the rubble of SHIELD, Clint finds an unfinished op involving a cloned woman. In order to track her down, the Avengers jump into the dangerous, high stakes world of Project Leda, Sarah Manning and her sestras, and a world where clones are commodities before they are people.</p><p>Spoilers for: Captain America 2, Orphan Black, Agents of SHIELD</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Appreciate the Void

 

            Clint dumped the file unceremoniously on Natasha’s lap as he dragged himself through the living room on the way to the couch. She raised an eyebrow at him as he flopped onto the couch face first, ignoring the careful stack of papers, photos, and maps Steve had arranged. Steve’s mouth opened and shut like a fish, and then he slumped a little, looking at Natasha for help. Everyone always looked to Natasha for help when it came to Clint these days. They used to go to Clint for help with Natasha, but since they became the Avengers, not just two highly trained specialists in a sea of overly intense talented people with a penchant for the dirty work not even the United States government would take on, she solved the puzzle that was Clint Barton. She solved this puzzle every day, again, and again, and again. Some days, pieces were missing, but she made do. She was Russian, after all.

            “Steve was using that couch, you know,” she said lightly, opening the file he dumped on her lap.

            “I’m getting too old for this,” he muttered again the throw pillows Pepper so carefully chose, not knowing that they’d be subjected blood and saliva, at the least, on a nearly daily basis. “When did I last sleep?”

            Natasha checked her watch. “Two nights ago. But that’s not our fault.”

            “Tash,” Clint said, cracking open one eye. “If you got a call that your—if you got a call that I was alive when you thought I was dead, wouldn’t you also go halfway around the world to see me? If the answer is no, please lie to me.”

            The corner of her mouth lifted just slightly. “Yes.”

            “Now I can’t tell if you’re lying or not,” he groaned. He pulled a now bent photo out from under his elbow and tossed it onto the floor. “That’s yours, Rogers?”

            “All of it,” Steve said calmly. “Everything on that couch.”

            Clint rolled sideways, and Steve reluctantly tugged each pile free and back onto the floor. Natasha stopped watching the lines of Clint’s face relax into slumber and went back to the file he gave her. The front of the file had OPS: AJ-17-1904  TOP SECRET stamped in the top right hand corner, as did every paper inside. The first page was a picture of a gorgeous young woman with dark wavy hair, a firm set mouth, olive skin, and eyes that had seen far too much in a world that hates for women to see and understand.

            _Sarah Manning  DOB: March 15, 1984   ASSOCIATION: LEDA_

            “She your new partner?” Natasha asked, glancing up but Clint was fast asleep and snoring, his drool leaving a darkening spot on the pillows. Pepper was going to kill them.

            “What is it?” Steve said, still sorting through files. It drove Tony nuts that Steve still liked physical copies of everything, but Natasha understood. Some things were better understood when held in your own two hands.

            “Not sure yet,” Natasha said, and flipped to the next page. At the top of the page was the picture of another young woman, who looked identical to the woman on the first page, but this one had a different name, look in her eyes, hair style, and birth date. Natasha slowly pulled the two papers apart and held them side by side. She stared at them for ten seconds then said, softly, “Well.”

            Steve didn’t look up but said, “Now you sound like you know.”

            Slowly, Natasha slid off her chair and sat next to Steve on the floor. He stopped rearranging his own pictures and notes to look at the file in her hand. Quietly, Natasha laid out the women’s files side by side, and added the six other identified women on the rug next to them. Silently, she and Steve stared at the identical women with different birth dates, birth locations, hair styles, and faces, but yet, the same face. Repeated over and over again. Natasha touched her own face with light fingers, wondering what it was like to know someone else shared the same reflection as you.

            “A really good con artist,” Steve said at last. “The most reasonable argument is the simplest.”

            “Two weeks ago, SHIELD was destroyed from the inside by Hydra, Coulson’s alive, Fury’s alive, we work with the Hulk and Ironman, you’re Captain America, and you want to go with the simplest rationale here?”

            Steve’s mouth twitched into a smile. He glanced sideways and shrugged a little bit. “Okay. Fair enough. Theory?”

            “Clones,” Natasha said softly. “They’re clones.”

            “I thought we couldn’t clone humans,” Steve began to say, and then shook his head once and hard. “Of course we can. Don’t listen to me.”

            “I’m listening,” Natasha said. “But why does Clint have this file?”

            “Ask?” Steve suggested, reaching over to pick up Cosima’s file. He pointed to a line at the bottom. “Health: unstable, critical. Think it’s a Hydra project?”

            “Not sure. I’m going to read. Let Clint sleep a little,” Natasha says, sinking back against the chair and pulling the rest of the file onto her lap. There were hundreds of papers not including the women’s pictures and information in front of her. “No sense in waking him up until I know what I’m asking.”

            “He’s alright?” Steve asked, returning to his own project. Hydra killing SHIELD from the inside out was keeping him up at night. Natasha had grown used to sitting there with him in the evenings, helping him piece together the deception and the traitors’ recruitment methodology. He’d spent a few weeks with Sam, but returned without his sidekick and no explanations. Natasha wasn’t one to pry. Steve would talk when he wanted to talk.

            Natasha glanced at her partner passed out on the couch. “For a given definition of alright.”

            Steve glanced at her. “And you?”

            She wasn’t alright, but Steve didn’t need that on his plate. She gave him a small smile. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

            She meant that she hadn’t fled when she testified, undermined all of her covers, put herself—and the rest of the team—in imminent danger. She meant that she had chosen to stay and face the aftermath, even when it went against all of her instincts. She meant that she recognized there had been a choice at all.

            Steve studied her for a long minute, and then turned back to his own puzzle. “You are.”

 


	2. Heroes Come The Common Way

She let him sleep for twelve hours straight. Clint slept in binge waves, even when they weren’t off duty. Sleeping felt superfluous to him so he tended to wear himself to the point where he couldn’t do anything other than sleep, or he self-medicated. In the wake of New York, he’d be trying to stay away from the self-medication path to slumber though some weeks were more successful than other weeks. Natasha slept because she trained herself to fall asleep when and where she needed, for exactly as long as she needed to be asleep. Clint never said it, but Natasha knew he was envious of her control over her body.

            Sometime after midnight, he rolled off the couch with a thud and cursed in three different languages. Tonight, he found words in English, French, and Pashtu. Natasha made a mental note to ask about that Pashtu and what he dreamt about for so long. He sat up and she could see his pale eyes from the kitchen where she sat under the lone light over the long farm table. Sometimes, she still looked for the unearthly blue in his eyes. But tonight, his eyes were the color of mountain creek water. Clear. Natural. His.

            “Time?” He asked, his voice rough with sleep. She liked his voice like this, still waking up. Still vulnerable. When she first met him years ago, she’d scold him that it gave him away. That one day, he’d die with his voice still scratchy and raw. He hadn’t cared then. He didn’t care now. The closest he’d come to death, his voice had always been fully awake.

            “Little after 12:30,” she told him and pushed the file to the middle of the table. “We need to talk about this.”

            He got off the floor and shuffled into the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes in the bright light. Natasha watched him start the Caj, also known as Stark’s version of the Keurig because he refused to buy something mass marketed. Clint slumped against the countertop and frowned at her. “They’re clones.”

            Natasha touched the folder with her fingertips. “It appears. The DNA analysis only accounts for a small amount of encoded DNA to mark copyright.”

            “The question is,” Clint said. “Why did SHIELD care?”

            The Caj beeped and Natasha said quietly, “Or why did HYDRA care and does it matter if they did?”

            “You think Leda was a HYDRA project?” Clint took the cup to the table and sat down hard in a seat. He sipped the coffee, winced, and sat the cup down. “Anything pointing to it?”

            “Sitwell,” Natasha said, careful to arrange the words in her mouth to keep her anger and resentment out of her tone, “managed SHIELD’s involvement.”

            Clint removed the folder out from beneath Natasha’s fingers and opened to the top sheet again and the first clone. He traced the outline of Sarah Manning’s photo. “Which means HYDRA was managing this project.”

            “At least the surveillance on it. Doesn’t mean that they funded it.”

            Clint’s light eyes lifted to meet hers. “But you think they did.”

            “Yes.”

            He sipped at the coffee again. “Are we playing twenty questions or are you going to spit out everything on your mind?”

            When the team did mission assessments, they worked in a group, brainstorming possible outcomes, objectives, and reasoning behind the information they receive from both their internal intelligence (Natasha and Clint, referred internally as HUMINT) and their externally collected intelligence (JARVIS and other Stark systems that collected GEOINT, MASINT, OSINT and previously, SHIELD which provided most of the SIGINT and TECHINT). During the brainstorming sessions, Natasha preferred to offer straight facts and let others hypothesize on the meaning.

            But it hadn’t always been like that. Once upon a time, it’d been just Clint and Natasha and he’d taught her to speculate. Speculation was a risk and the risk assessment on it was shitty. But so was the risk assessment on him. And she still chose him, again and again and again.

            She opened her mouth, shut it, and took a deep breath. Clint kept flipping through the pages, content to let her take her time.

Then she leaned forward and said, “It’s an incomplete operations file. The rest of it was probably digital only and should have been on that mainframe server that I dumped on the internet. But I searched, and couldn’t find anything. So then I went digging on Project Leda and found a few things, but almost no financial trail. It ends, too abruptly. But the clones—the women, I mean—they have paper trails. They exist, Clint. They’re real. They live lives that aren’t covers. I dug deep, deeper than any agencies ever going to go, and they’re real people. I don’t think they’re HYDRA agents. HYDRA’s not going to go back and plant kindergarten photos.”

Clint looked up and said, “So what’s your theory?”

“There are eight women identified in this file,” she said, keeping her voice low. She reached over Clint’s arm, flipped a few pages to a spreadsheet, and tapped the bottom line. “But they assessed metrics on nine. There’s a missing woman.”

Clint touched the line. “No name. Just her ID number. Where are they taking metrics from?”

“They were on the servers of Dyad Institute. I checked. Everything’s been wiped. There is no record of any of these women on the Dyad Institute’s internal servers. Moreover, the Dyad Institute appears to be undergoing a shift in leadership,” Natasha said. She slid into the chair next to Clint and found one of the women’s papers. “She used to be in charge. Now I can’t find any communication from her.”

“Okay,” he said and leaned back. “Did you talk to Steve about this?”

“Why would I talk to Steve about this?” Natasha snapped. “Look at how little--.”

“Nat,” Clint said, touching her hand. She stilled. “I wasn’t blaming you if you did. I’m trying to wrap my head around this because right now, we don’t have a problem.”

“A missing file is a problem,” Natasha said, staring at the callouses between his fingers. “Because this file is a woman. Who is a clone. In a project that was being managed at an international security and intelligence agency by a known enemy.”

Clint pressed his lips together. “Okay. That I can work with. Think one of these other clones knows her?”

“Maybe,” admitted Natasha. “They have contact with each other.”

Clint tucked the papers back inside the folder. “Should we shadow or contact them?”

“Watch first,” Natasha decided, “Just in case they’re HYDRA.”

“But you don’t think they are.”

“I didn’t think Sitwell was either,” Natasha said, frowning at Clint. “Gut feelings aren’t reliable.”

Clint grinned. “That’s where you and I differ, love. I never liked that prat. Okay. Where are we going?”

“Toronto,” Natasha said. “We’re going to Toronto.”


	3. Pictures in Resolute Pain

Clones, ending up in the same city, even when they’d been born in various places across the world. There was something strange about that in Natasha’s mind and she spent a large part of the drive teasing it apart in her mind, examining all the possible angles, and listing possible hypotheses. Moreover, she wanted to know why, against all odds and apparently previous behavior, Sarah Manning had stayed. Natasha had spent the night memorizing the entire file and getting to know the women.

Clint stayed up half the night, a comforting presence with his head in her lap as he watched some movie involving an absurd amount of car wrecks. At one point, Natasha had pointed out that Boston had completely shut down after the Marathon bombings in its search for the two men responsible and the likelihood of a city carrying on business as normal with a terrorist going through the city causing multiple high fatality car wrecks was low.

Clint had patted her leg absentmindedly. “It’s okay. You can put ‘active imagination’ on your Christmas list.”

Now he dozed in the front seat, his arms crossed over his chest, his head resting on the window. He didn’t used to sleep when she drove. She didn’t know if it was a testament to her improved driving skills in America or whether his increasing trust for her.

At the border, Natasha rolled down her window and handed her and Clint’s fake IDs. They figured all their SHIELD covers were blown now but luckily, Stark was—well, he was Stark and when Natasha reluctantly requested light covers this morning, just something to get them over the border, he delivered within the hour.

“It’d even hold up to light scrutiny in jail, which is the only type of scrutiny I imagine happens in a Canadian jail,” he told her when he handed her the folder with a dramatic bow.

“We’ll try not to test that,” she said dryly.

Now, she realized that just crossing the border was a test in of itself. The guard looked at Clint and Natasha said, careful to make her words light and easy, “Hey, honey, we’re at the border.”

Clint awoke in a single fluid motion, his eyes narrowed and sharp as he looked at the border guard. He tugged his new passport out of his backpocket and handed it over lazily. He ran his fingers down Natasha’s arm and gave her an entirely inappropriate wink.

“Tired?” he asked. “Need me to drive?”

She shook her head as the guard asked the usual questions about contraband and what they might be carrying over the border. They shook their heads, saying they were visiting a friend in Toronto for a few days. They gave Sarah Manning’s original address, doubting she’d be there anymore. And the guard definitely didn’t search the vehicle for weapons, thank god.

As they drove away from the border safely into Canada, Clint slumped in the seat but remained awake. “Good job, Stark.”

“You woke up like a bomb went off,” Natasha said.

“That’s not how I wake up when a bomb goes off and you should know that,” he argued, rolling onto his side, watching her drive. She liked that he didn’t mind if she drove most of the way. It’s how she sorted out everything in her head. And sure enough, his voice dropped a bit, to a quiet gravelly space that so few others had the pleasure of hearing. “So where are you?”

He didn’t mean on the map. Natasha pressed her lips together and then said, “It’s strange, that the clones all ended up in the same place. There is one from Ukraine, a few born in England, Germany, Austria, America, and Canada. Why Toronto?”

“Free healthcare,” Clint joked and rolled his eyes when she shot him a glare. “Nat? Stop. That place where your mind is going is a shitty place.”

She waited until their GPS finished telling them where to go, and then said, turning away from him to merge onto the highway, “Why aren’t you more upset than you are?”

“Because I was in the middle of fucking nowhere when shit went south and I feel worse that you and Rogers were without me than I feel that SHIELD went under.”

“Your allegiance is to SHIELD.”

“Yeah, a long time ago, it was.”

She didn’t need to ask him to whom his allegiance belonged now. And she’d rather not hear it aloud right then. She pressed down on the accelerator. “How’s Coulson?”

“Alive.”

“Fury?”

“Also alive.” Clint snorted and rubbed at his face like he did when he was uncomfortable and exhausted. “God, and they think we’re the superheroes.”

Natasha smiled. “What’s Coulson going on about?”

“Fury’s left him in charge of SHIELD but you know, it’s all shit now. I told him you and I would talk but there’s no rush. Coulson gets us.”

That made one person in the world.

“It bothers you, doesn’t it?” Clint said, putting his feet up on the dash. Nat had long ago stopped telling him the risks of losing his legs in a car accident that way. “How close this feels to the Red Room.”

Natasha’s jaw clenched before she could stop it and she thought she was lucky that it was only Clint in the car, and if he already guessed this aspect of this mission, then it didn’t matter if she revealed a tell. “Yes.”

“And one of them’s from Ukraine too.”

Natasha said, “Turn on the radio.”

Clint leaned over, turned on the radio, and then turned down the volume to zero. “Tasha.”

“Clinton.”

He smiled a little bit. “You know they’re not HYDRA.”

“I know.”

“And when we find them, they’re going to be ordinary women made of extraordinary genetic material.”

“Yes.”

“So,” he said, softening his voice until it felt like a knife twisting in Natasha’s heart, “They are not your sisters. We aren’t here to save them. We’re just here to ensure that the people we used to work for didn’t leave stray ends we ought to be cleaning up.”

“I was once a stray end.” And now there were eight women in Toronto whose lives were train wrecks. Eight women who felt like Natasha did, but without her skill set. The thought sucked the air out of the car, made it hard to breathe.

“Not for us,” Clint said. “Not for me.”

Natasha leaned back in her seat a little bit, relaxing. “Next rest stop, we’ll switch?”

“Sure thing.” And she watched his fingers turn back up the volume on the radio. 


	4. Better than Before

Natasha had been in Toronto twice before in her life. Once, for the Red Room. She seduced and killed a Japanese businessman whose corporation threatened a corporation who underwrote the Red Room. Of course, she hadn’t known that then. She had only known her target, what he liked so she could play the character well, and her cover. She’d followed him from Manila where he had a meeting to Toronto where he met with several other energy tycoons.

She seduced him, fucked him, and then offered him a drink with a small amount of a drug in it that sent him into cardiac arrest. The fast-acting pharmaceutical was metabolized out of his body by the time the coroner took samples for the toxicology report. His death was reported as a natural death and his corporation was sent into disarray as his incapable sons fought over the direction of their father’s vision.

By then, Natasha was long gone.

The second time Natasha had been to Toronto was with Clint. It didn’t start with him. A mission had gone south and Clint had taken a shot to save Natasha and the mission, and killed two innocent lives by his own hand. Sometimes in their line of work, their inactions killed innocents and those were hard enough to swallow. But Clint had put an arrow through the heart of a little boy and another through the heart of his father, and then he had disappeared. He missed their rendezvous point. Coulson had expressed concern that Clint had run into trouble, though if Natasha’s memory served her well and it always did, the exact words Coulson had used were “I’m concerned Clint has become delayed.” The line was delivered in the exact same tone he’d use to say that Clint had also become a fire-breathing dragon.

Natasha knew better. The moment she’d seen the arrow thud straight through the kid’s heart, stopping it and leaving him bleeding out on the floor of a factory, his eyes staring up at the factory fans in perpetual confusion, she’d known that Clint would run. In SHIELD terms, though, they called this ‘taking flex time’. If Natasha had taken flex time, they’d call it “AWOL” but Clint had been around the organization a time or two. He didn’t go absent without leave. He always had Coulson’s implicit permission to do whatever he wanted as long as he came back when he was summoned.

She followed Clint to Brussels, then St. John’s, surprised he chose a tropical island, and then not at all surprised when he spent less than twelve hours on the island before returning to the airport with a scowl on his face. He teased her about being a cold weather person but so was he. They did better in places where people spent little time wasting words.

She followed him to Toronto where he bought tickets farther north into the Arctic. In some strange twist of events, he checked into the same hotel where she’d fucked and killed the Japanese businessman. She booked a room across from him, and while he was in the shower, broke into his room and sat on his bed, reading a book when he came out, a gun leveled to her head and a towel loose around his hips. She remembered exactly what he looked like with water dripping from his mouse-brown hair, off his long eyelashes, running down his muscular arms and down his chest. There were women at SHIELD, and men too, who would kill Natasha to be where she was at that moment. All Natasha saw though, was the hollow look in his eyes, the scars across his chest and stomach, the red of his skin from the water that scalded him.

He’d lowered the gun and set it on a bookcase. The shower continued to run when he walked across the room, lay down on the bed next to her, and took a deep breath, the type of breath people take when they try not to cry. Natasha had long ago stopped considering offering her body as a way for Clint to let go after missions. There was only so many times that she could see the stricken look of pity cross his face. But here, she almost offered it again. She put her book down and slipped her fingers through his fingers, raking water down his ear and neck to dampen the pillow. He eased an arm around her hips, and closed his eyes.

They didn’t talk about the mission. They didn’t do anything. She just kept her fingers on him all night and he finally fell asleep, his nose pressed against her hip and the small line of skin she allowed to appear between her jeans and her shirt.

Now in Toronto, Clint tossed her an easy smile, lifting his sunglasses. “You look good driving this car.”

“It’s my car,” she said, pulling into the hotel. Not the same one. She didn’t need that distraction on this half-assed mission. “I wouldn’t have picked it if I didn’t look good driving it.”

“That’s a lie,” Clint said, stepping out and opening his hand. “Where’s your card? I’ll check us in.”

Natasha wavered for a second and then reluctantly tugged her light cover’s card from her wallet and held it out to him. “We do not need the executive suite.”

“We don’t,” he said over his shoulder. “You do.”

She scowled at him as she grabbed their bags and gave her keys to the valet. The valet whistled at her and if she wasn’t so concerned about Barton booking them something absurdly expensive, she would have stopped to reeducate the poor kid. As it was, she didn’t have time. She dumped her bags at Barton’s feet as he winked and flirted with the receptionist who was nearly the color of Natasha’s hair.

“I upgraded us,” Clint explained, winking at Natasha. “I thought you’d like that, honey.”

Her eyes said, _Touch me and die_ , but her smile, body, and words said, “Oh _really_? Tell me it has a Jacuzzi. I could really go for a Jacuzzi.”

Clint shook his head. “We’ll get sidetracked, love. Let’s go for a walk first, shall we?”

Upstairs in the room, Natasha changed into a lightweight jersey dress and a cardigan, slipping her feet into flats that she knew she could run in. Not that she expected those problems from the clones, but she didn’t know exactly what to expect and her training ensured she’d be overprepared rather than under prepared. On the other side of the room, Clint slid a Real Madrid shirt over his head and tightened the laces on his boots.

Natasha crossed the room silently but she knew Clint felt her coming toward him, the way his fingers slowed as he turned down the collar of the shirt. He sat still on the edge of the bed when she sank down on it and pressed her forehead into the back of his neck.

“I’ll need you,” she said quietly, closing her eyes against the enormity of the sentence. “Especially with Helena.”

Clint reached behind him, finding one of her hands planted on the floral comforter. He pulled her hand around to his stomach and squeezed it in his hand. “I know. Let’s go find some clones.”

They took a cab to the Dyad Institute and paid in cash, leaving as little trace of them behind as they started from there and worked their way outward. They left a message for Rachel, the missing clone who had been the head of the Institute when she was last heard from, and then waited, patiently, until what they expected to happen happened:

Someone called back the number that Natasha had left with the suspiciously un-receptionist like person who took their information at Dyad. Clint began to trace the call when Natasha answered, playing the role of a journalist looking to speak to Rachel about genetically modified beef in the Canadian food industry. The woman on the phone did in fact sound almost exactly like Rachel did according to all the YouTube clips Natasha had watched.

But she was not Rachel. Everything was a little off. She took too long to think, her accent wasn’t reliable, and she agreed to meet Natasha and Clint in public. She wasn’t Rachel at all. After lining up a time to meet in the next hour at a Starbucks around the corner, Natasha hung up the phone.

Clint pulled the earbud through which he listened out of his ear and looked at Natasha. “So?”

“How’d you do?” Natasha asked, glancing at his phone.

Clint handed it to her. “She’s in a neighborhood just to the north. I got it down to a four block radius. Not Rachel, I take it.”

“No,” Natasha said softly. “That wasn’t Rachel. But someone at Dyad is sending her information about who inquires about Rachel.”

“Which one is it?”

Natasha didn’t want to speculate, but she could be wrong with him. “Sarah, I think.”

Clint squinted up at the sky. “You want me in person or in the sky?”

“I don’t think she’s a threat to me,” Natasha said. “Nothing suggested these women had any particular training in combat.”

“Except Helena.”

Natasha glanced at him. “Except Helena.”

Clint’s mouth set into a thin line. “Let’s go scout out this location.”

“What if Dyad’s HYDRA?” Natasha asked, because the question needed to be asked.

Clint hesitated and said, “If HYDRA wanted to take us out there are easier ways than to lead us on a goose chase with clones.”

“Maybe this is more fun,” Natasha said as they began to walk toward the Starbucks.

“They’re a multi-headed monster, Tash, not a cat. Let’s be real here.”


End file.
